Norman Rockwell

by Laura Claridge

  Peter’s father, Richard Levine, was a financially comfortable Manhattan lawyer who lacked the affluence to make his family a compelling target for extortion. Stunned, Levine offered a $25,000 reward for the recovery of his son alive, and $5,000 if he were found dead. For three months, reports surfaced daily about someone seeing Peter somewhere around the United States. And as word got out that the Levines were left-wing sympathizers who had recently hosted a meeting for citizens interested in exploring communism, people began to wonder—even to hope, in self-protection for their own families—that the kidnapping was politically motivated.

  Twelve-year-old Peter Levine—sweet, handsome, slightly bowlegged, and a “typical boy”—had his picture broadcast all over the nation, but in New Rochelle, the drama consumed the city. Cars, houses, and sewers were searched, and Boy Scouts were bused into town to help re-tread paths already traveled at least once. Parents and children alike would open the Standard-Star every day to another picture of the doe-eyed boy seeming to stare pleadingly at them over the breakfast table. Circulars with Peter’s picture appeared everywhere; newsreels played at the local Loew’s.

  For any parent, it was a nightmare. For the high-profile, wealthy, extremely visible Rockwells, it must have been unbearable. Everything that Rockwell wanted to avoid, all the potential violence he felt urban living contained, had taken root in his midst, enacted on the downtown streets where his first local studio was located. His Boy Scouts, now put to use to hunt down a kidnapped child—this wasn’t what he had in mind for calendar fodder.

  In the spring of 1938, before the case was resolved, the Rockwells precipitously went to England on vacation, yanking Jerry out of first grade. Their sudden departure left their accountant, Morton Kutner, flustered about how to handle their financial affairs, as well as other errands they expected him to tend to. He wrote them in London about the trunk they had left behind in their hurry, assuring them that he would forward it as well as their correspondence.

  The Rockwells’ sudden departure was less frivolously motivated than their friends assumed: Mary Rockwell was going to England to get an abortion.

  Although Peter was too young at the time to remember, later, anything of the extended vacation, both Jarvis and Tom, then seven and five years old, recall odd moments from the months abroad. “I recall random things,” Jarvis says. “That we saw a tank stored in a garage once; and that we went over on a German cruise ship, as though that became a big deal at some point when we all talked about that summer.” One of Tom’s most vivid memories centers around the bed-and-breakfast they all stayed at for a few weeks; he and Jarvis both think they were separated to vacation at various homes while their mother was “sick,” as they were told. “Never were we made to worry about any of it,” they claim.

  They only came to know of the real reason for the trip years later, when their parents were called on to advise one of their grown sons on the subject of abortion. Pictures of Mary would seem to bear out the lack of stress that the boys remember: rarely during the 1930s does she look as radiant, even lyrically happy, as now. Her husband looks, in contrast, tenser than usual, and one picture taken before they departed seems comically, if accidentally, to symbolize their dilemma: standing side by side, the couple evince different attitudes—in her hat, with a corsage on her coat, Mary appears slightly bemused; her husband, however, looks tense, his long arms crossed in front of his waist, his hands awkwardly dangling, crossed in front of his crotch, as if to hide the scene of the crime.

  During the summer, Rockwell finally indulged his desire to visit luminaries he had studied in school, including Arthur Rackham, who, among other things, had done the exquisite pen-and-ink drawings for Peter Pan back when Rockwell was first thinking about pursuing illustration as a career. When recalling the London vacation for his autobiography, he spoke only of these encounters, especially his wonder that he was asked to paint in the eyes on a self-portrait that George Belcher, a famous elderly illustrator, was completing. Jarvis remembers his father’s excitement at meeting his childhood heroes: “He was just bubbling over with it, he was beside himself.”

  From their friends—mercifully absent themselves during the kidnapping’s denouement—the Rockwells got the news that, on May 30, on a beautiful Sunday evening around six-thirty, the yacht captain for the wealthy heiress Mrs. Lewis Iselin sighted a small torso being carried by a strong east wind onto the rocks off Mrs. Iselin’s Davenport Neck estate. He called the police, who waded out to the rocks to find the headless, limbless body clad in the same maroon windbreaker and blue sweater the papers had imprinted on everyone’s mind for the past three months. Peter Levine’s head had been sawed off, his arms and legs eaten by fish. Two teenage boys—the black hoods, chains, locks, and firearms found in their home corresponding to other evidence in the case—ended up receiving three- to seven-year sentences for attempting to extort $25,000 from the Levines, but although the F.B.I. thought them guilty of kidnapping and murder, they were never convicted and the crime remained unsolved. Now the papers published pictures of men in rowboats, “grappling in search of [the] slain boy’s head.”

  What part the kidnapping had played in the Rockwells’ decision to get the abortion, or their subsequent decision to leave New Rochelle forever, is a matter of conjecture. But from what we know of Mary and Norman’s attitude toward this type of public tragedy, a violence so extreme as to be undeniable, it seems impossible that they weren’t deeply marked by it. And it would have been impossible not to become keenly alert to their own family’s vulnerability to kidnapping and ransom efforts. The almost nonstop stress their marriage had sustained since its inception—the painter’s depression, the young wife’s near immediate assumption of motherhood—three sons in six years—and now this horrible event, surely helped motivate their decision that they could not handle the complications of another pregnancy and additional family member.

  A month before the Rockwells returned from England, a hurricane hit Westchester County full force, deluging New Rochelle with five days of rain. Dozens of boats on the Sound and the Hudson River were smashed, old, valuable trees uprooted, and beaches washed out. Somehow the storm seemed a metaphor to Norman and Mary, who realized anew when they arrived in time to observe the storm’s damage that they wanted to get out of New Rochelle permanently, not just for a few months. Later, Rockwell would claim that his sudden inspiration that he could buy a farm in a small town for what one trip abroad cost them guided them to start shopping in the country. Like most major choices, the Rockwells’ supposedly impulsive decision to move was actually backed by years of reflection, dating to those days in Paris six years before, when they’d discovered how much happier they were with a slower pace of life.

  Now, with the Levine case staring them in the face—in New Rochelle, it had received more coverage than had the Lindbergh kidnapping—and the sordid kidnapping and murder somehow symbolizing all those things Rockwell disliked about the city, they decided to take the next, obvious step. After all, they had made the radical decision to abort a family pregnancy; clearly, they were trying to invest emotionally and logistically now in a path that would improve their family’s well-being. And they—or Norman—had used up New Rochelle anyway.

  Fred Hildebrandt, the model and friend who had accompanied Norman on the camping expedition to Canada, talked often about the Vermont hills around the Batten Kill river, which he believed to be the site of the best trout fishing in America. Not much for fishing, Norman paid little attention until he heard others chatting about the Green Mountains as well. When it turned out that the illustrator Mead Schaeffer had become a convert to the beauties of life across the border, Rockwell decided it was time to explore.

  Mary and Norman spent a leisurely weekend around Bennington, where they found the landscape far too social, too reminiscent of what they wanted to escape. On the verge of giving up, they were shown a large colonial house on four hundred acres of land, set back from the road in the remote town of Arlington, Vermon
t—a village only ten minutes from the New York State border. Rockwell liked the way the townspeople conducted themselves when he visited the general store or asked questions of people walking by; they were friendly but not forward, reserved but unaffectedly courteous, interesting and intelligent without pretense, and hardworking above all else—an ethic the illustrator recognized as the common coin of the realm, in spite of the divide between farming, which most of them did, and painting covers for The Saturday Evening Post.

  The Rockwells felt that their sons would receive the bucolic, innocent childhood Rockwell himself idolized as every boy’s ideal; and the personalities of the Vermonters lent themselves, the artist believed, to opening a whole new panoply of models to him. Probably in response to the Regionalists, as well as to the gratifying experience of being rooted in a happy family life, his painting was taking him toward such visuals anyway: he sought faces and figures nowadays that spoke of their connectedness to their land, their homes, their families. The New Rochelle population, he had come to feel, were too adept at masking their emotions, at homogenizing their characters into a kind of suburban anonymity or insipidness. If he began anew, his studio scented daily with the aroma of fresh pungent cow manure wafting its way through the rooms, he would have arrived back at the source underwriting his childhood myth of liberation, the country his permanent soil at last.

  Cautiously, the Rockwells purchased the house in 1938 at first as a vacation home, aware that the place was not yet ready to live in over the winter. Between then and the summer of 1939, they would enjoy driving back and forth, gradually getting acquainted with the townsfolk, and carefully setting themselves up as good neighbors, even though they were ’Yorkers, in the lingo of the town. Through his regular reading of The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, Rockwell had kept abreast of the Southern Agrarians, a group of poets and critics who aggressively promoted a return to the agrarian way of life that would forestall the rise of monopoly capitalism and collectivism, and who had romanticized the return to the rural. Certainly the idea, following the free-for-all of the 1920s, that a simpler way of living carried its own rewards, was very much in the air during this subsequent decade. Rockwell was smitten: the idea of moving to the country seemed to solve much of his current unrest.

  Rockwell began painting some Post covers in Arlington, including one that he had begun just after returning from England. It would appear as the October 8, 1938, cover, incurring more than the usual number of comments for its unusual twist. On the command of Lorimer’s successor, Wesley Stout, the background circle on the Post cover had disappeared, allowing the subject to take its own most natural shape. This autumnal painting by Rockwell exploited the new pictorial options, albeit gently, in what appeared to be an aesthetic tease: a blank canvas holding an ominous “due date” notice faced the artist, whose back was to the audience—the first, but not the last time Rockwell would employ such a metaphor.

  A text about art making a comment about making art, ad infinitum, such self-conscious reflexivity was a familiar conceit of modernist literature and painting. But the charm of this cover is still striking, even while its meaning is deeply personal. The horseshoe on top of the easel for good luck and the pipe tucked into the pocket consolidate the myth of the modest, hardworking artist, the everyman doing a nine-to-five job like the rest of his readers. Consistent, dependable, he may face problems being creative—but he’ll get the job done, one way or the other, we can count on that, regardless of the stark evidence to the contrary staring us in the face.

  At the same time, the past spring’s events lend special explanatory power to the “due date” sign at the top of the blank canvas. Here, in place of Rockwell’s unfailing creative progeny appearing when it is supposed to, sits an all-encompassing yawn of white, the due date productive of nothing this time, the painter turned not to his audience, but in private, mute dialogue with the missing picture.

  Rockwell connected with others most vividly and viscerally through the Post covers—and with himself, most intimately of all. Years later, his friend Erik Erikson would tell him that he painted his happiness rather than lived it. The statement was one that resonated deeply with Rockwell; he described it often, as an acute moment of self-realization. For his family, a sense that their life to some extent imitated art—that they spent their energies trying to live the covers their father painted—frustrated their desire to be close to their parents. Jarvis maintains that his family can best be understood “as a group of well-meaning people all turned away from the center of the circle, with a cipher at its heart.” “I felt that our home was unreal, and I felt it early on,” he continues. Almost preternaturally observant, the oldest son very early on displayed his father’s great intelligence and restless ambition. “Somehow, at age seven, I recognized the truth. And I felt things were given to me and then taken away, suddenly not there anymore. Like I’d feel secure as if I understood how things were, how they were supposed to be, then it was all gone somehow.”

  Sue Erikson Bloland, daughter of Erik Erikson, believes her relationship to her father similar to Jarvis’s with his: “Dad’s fame—particularly his idealized image as a father figure—engendered fantasies in both of us: he SHOULD be the perfect father, and I SHOULD be the ideal daughter that one would expect a perfect father to have. We were both drawn to the illusion of specialness that his public image seemed to offer us. As a result, the experience of disconnection left us both feeling more deeply flawed and ashamed.” Yes, responds Rockwell’s oldest son, that sounds just right.

  A preoccupation with the missing father, or with the need for the child to father himself through his art, must have reverberated in unconscious tracks each time that Dickens’s novels brought Rockwell’s own remote father back to life. And Mary read Dickens aloud to her husband throughout their marriage. When Rockwell’s own father had died, a month later the illustrator’s firstborn son had replaced him, neatly, almost without missing a beat, engendering a new Jarvis Waring Rockwell. Of course—even inevitably—the artist would replicate the same well-meaning but distant relationship with this son, who inconveniently refused denial and protested, almost from birth, instead. “I wanted to connect so badly, and I kept trying, and all I can remember from my earliest days is my father trying too, but pulling back, every single time I got close,” Jarvis still laments. But at least within this generation of Rockwell men, the father encouraged his son’s voice, enabling Jarvis to aim his protests in the right direction, in contrast to the illustrator’s own internalization of his discontents with his Victorian father.

  His father’s absence unfortunately heightened Rockwell’s gentle but unmistakable contempt toward his mother. According to his sons, he thought her a hypochondriac, a silly and annoying, ineffectual complainer. Never once did he fail to take care of her logistically, but his lack of filial affection was fairly clear to everyone, including her niece, Mary Amy Orpen, who salutes Rockwell’s unceasing generosity to his mother in spite of his feelings. Having tired of Providence—or the exhausted relatives in Rhode Island having exceeded their patience with Nancy—Mrs. Rockwell was back in New Rochelle that year, looking forward to spending Christmas of 1938 among her three young grandsons, “even though,” as her niece remembers well, “she preferred girls instead.” Her artist son disliked having her around because she distracted him from his painting. Besides, he often felt anxious during the December holidays, wishing they would pass quickly so he could resume his work schedule without feeling the brunt of family expectations.

  His confidence regained as a result of having successfully illustrated Tom Sawyer, Rockwell once again resumed accepting far more commissions than would prove feasible to complete. Word was getting around that with his acceptance came the unspoken—he might renege on the agreement, or at the least, end up months if not years late completing the assignment. From now to the end of his life, Rockwell felt oppressed by his inability to say yes to more requests, and by his compulsion to accept so many commissions that h
is only hope of ever making deadlines was to work seven days a week.

  On February 24, 1939, George Macy wrote him a playful but worried letter from London, asking if the silence from his side by any chance meant he had not yet begun the Huckleberry Finn illustrations. Macy’s suspicions were of course on target, and Rockwell wired him finally on March 10 that he didn’t see how he could possibly meet the deadlines. On April 6, Macy wrote a beseeching letter: “I beg you to try to arrange your affairs in order that you may do these pictures for us.” He offered to rearrange the already announced publication schedule so that Rockwell would receive an extra five months’ grace period. Although it still placed tremendous pressure on him, Rockwell agreed. The sleepless nights from worry, the embarrassment at dealing with disappointed clients (he usually had Mary deliver the bad news), the concern over finances—the artist’s difficulty with arranging a practical work schedule was real and caused him great distress. But at some level, it served more than one purpose. It delivered the rewards that made the pain worthwhile.

  Part of the pressure slowing Rockwell down with the Heritage commission was his uncertainty about his new boss at the Post, Wesley Stout, a man who enjoyed wielding his power by sending Rockwell’s paintings back for changes. Stout ensured that Rockwell saw negative comments that came his way; though he admired Rockwell’s work, he disliked the unchallenged position that the illustrator seemed to hold at the magazine.